


You Never Forget Your First

by Alex_deMorra (Ergo_Sum)



Series: Fence Sitter [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-15 01:47:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8037424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ergo_Sum/pseuds/Alex_deMorra
Summary: Chapter 2: Fence SitterYoung Micah and Tyrell do the Slip-n-Slide thing and proceed to get in trouble.





	1. Chapter 1

Tyrell was hollering at me from the back yard, “Cuh. Hey, Cuh. Where are you? Can you come out, Cuh?”

Instant happiness.

He was my favorite person, aside from Lilybelle, who wasn’t a person but a caterpillar, and anyway, she totally got me. I peeled back my Spiderman curtains, the ones my mom made for me a few months ago for my birthday, and I saw him. He unlatched the chain link gate on our chain link fence, entered, turned around, latched it again, and bounded to the sliding glass door while he continued his shouting, “Cuh...c’mon.”

I ran out of my room and down the hall to open the door up for him. In the background, my mom is making a bit of fun in a pretend super low voice, trying to sound like my friend, “Where are you?”

She liked telling stories about how Tyrell came to our house every day to play. I don’t know why she found it so funny. He was my best friend. Why wouldn’t he come over? She said it’s the way he bellowed only part of my name, which is Micah, but he did it with this really deep, low voice that a kid shouldn’t have.

I still didn’t get it.

Anyway.

I flicked up the metal catch that locks the door from the inside, and pulled the handle across my body to the right, and got Tyrell more clearly for sake of sliding a few handprints out of the way. He was wearing these blue and white striped overalls with a red baseball hat.

I stood to the side to let him and went right to the fridge to pull out two Capri Sun’s in the only flavor that ever mattered: Fruit Punch. After sharing stories about how our respective mornings went, I ask him what he wanted to do. “Do you even have to ask?”

No, not really.

I shout, “Mom!”

Silence.

So I try again, “Mom!”

Footfalls thump from upstairs and I hear her over the banister, “What?”

“Can we use the slip and slide?”

It was still set up from the weekend and it took forever to get all the rocks out from the dirt and clumps of grass to make sure we got a good ride. I’m not supposed to use it without asking. It was taking her forever to tell us whether we could or not. Finally, she did, “You get fifteen minutes. Your time is up when I come out with towels, got that?”

Tyrell and I shout in unison, “Got it!”

We raced back outside and whipped off our clothes until we were down to our underwear. He had on The Hulk.

It was cool.

Mine were bright yellow with bright blue trim on the y-front and red, yellow, and blue stripes on the elastic that was still a little bit loose since I hadn’t grown into them.

Together, we uncoiled the long green hose, pulling it carefully to the top of the long strip of plastic. We screwed in the nozzle and double checked it to make sure that it wasn’t going to spray everywhere when the water turned on. Then, we turned on the water.

Little fountains of water erupted along each side of the long plastic stripe. We were supposed to wait a few minutes for the first go and we were both pretty impatient so we worked the slide. Him from the top and me from the bottom. We sloshed the water around with our hands and our feet to get the plastic wet. This totally cut down on the time we had to wait.

Then we had to figure out who got to go first.

I got scissors.

He got rock.

He pounded on my two spread fingers in a Hulk style way, making me laugh. Seriously, it was okay that he went first because I was right behind him.

Tyrell backed up so that his heels were almost against the fence and then his eyes squinted in heavy concentration. He ran as hard as he could and took a flying leap onto his stomach. It was probably too much power even for him because his ass caught up with his arms and at the end of the plastic, he looked like a bug, on his back and with all his arms and legs pointed toward the sun. He stayed there for a bit, basking in the greatness of flying on the ground in water.

Then I went. The ground shook with the force of my feet hitting the ground. My hair flew behind me. And I took a leap, Superman style, arms forward, legs behind. I made the perfect stream and only stopped when I hit the damp dirt, which stopped me and also gave me a little rash on my stomach.

We go again because it takes at least a hundred slides before we would even think about stopping for dirt rash.

I look up and see that mom’s bedroom window is open. I barely saw her through the black screen before she was gone again.

Tyrell ran again and this time, he tried to remain standing. Well, he didn’t try. He did it.

Then I did.

Then we tried together but it got totally messed up half way down and we went off the sides.

We have a kind of list of things we have to do. Otherwise, we didn’t to the slip and slide. There was standing and Superman. There was sitting cross-legged, which always takes a lot of times to get right. There was going backward on our back, which is only possible if we got into position and the other one gave us a push. And there was the really, really hard one: spinning on our back like a turtle. Neither of us figured out how to get more than a rotation or two. Though, that’s really okay because trying again was a pretty good reason not to stop.

By the time mom came out and turned off the hose, the ground all around the slide was mucky. And so were we. She unscrewed the hose from the slide and washed down each of us before giving us our respective towels to dry off and get inside.

We were both standing there with the towels draped around our shoulders even though it was super hot that day.

“Mom.”

“Micah.”

“Can we play in my room?”

“Yes. Go.”

So we did, though neither thought to pick up the clothes scattered between the sliding glass door and the kitchen, and proceeded to do stuff that kids do.

With Sharpies.

We got in so much trouble.

Tyrell drew rainbow suns in circles around all my bits. My cheeks. My other cheeks. My belly button. My knees. My nipples. My heels. My privates. And the tips of my fingers.

I looked pretty good, I thought.

Really good, actually.

Then I thought, and he agreed, that he should look as good as I did. Pretty soon, we had matching rainbow suns.

However, it was harder to see on him, except on his heels, because the rest of him was exactly the color of the brown of the marker that came with my Crayola Washables set. There was this drawing trick, though, that we both learned because of school. The colors stood out more if you lined them in black.

And the blackest of all black pens was the Sharpie.

I was so close to almost being done when mom came in to tell us that lunch was ready.

Mom didn’t finish what she was saying. She just stopped right there in my open bedroom door with her eyes on fire, and her lips pressed together,and her feet glued to the melting carpet.

Then she grabbed Tyrell and pulled him into the bathroom in the hallway along with gobs of washcloths and bottles of things.

It didn’t come off.

Well, the colors did and that was the sad part because the rainbows were really the whole point. It was the Sharpie that didn’t. And that made mom say things that she would put soap in my mouth if I said them. I remember this look where mom closed her eyes and smashed up her face before taking a deep breath and standing up. She looked how I felt when I knew I was in trouble and there were consequences.

Tyrell and I stood in the bathroom listening to the hum of mom talking to someone on the telephone. She came back with striped overalls and a shirt and socks and his red hat and gently asked him to put these back on. Then we all left the bathroom and sat at the table where we ate our ham sandwiches with no mustard or mayo or tomatoes but with lettuce and with Cheetos.

Then, his mom came over and took him away.

I didn’t get to see Tyrell for a week.


	2. Chapter 2

I knew something was wrong.

I knew it the second I woke up but I didn’t know what it was.

I got up and I went to the bathroom. I was going to change out of my pajamas but something made me turn left towards the kitchen rather than right to go back to my room.

My dad was there. He was wearing one of his thin cotton shirts streaked with motor oil and navy twill pants. His hair was messed up in dark brown waves that hung down his forehead and his skin was pallid. And he just sat there lost, with his hands wrapped around a no longer steaming mug of coffee. I stopped, partially hidden in the hallway, and I heard him say, “Suz, I never should have gone out there. I can’t stop thinking about what I saw. I can’t un-see it.”

My heart started pounding.

“I never wanted to see Grady like that.”

Grady.

That was Tyrell’s grandad.

They all lived together three doors down: Tyrell and his sister, his mom, his aunt Deja, and his grandparents Grady and Willa all live there. It’s a big house. The biggest on the street. And it was nice there. Like when you walked in, you wanted to sink into the cushions whether it was on the sofas or the chairs or on the beanbag they have stuffed in the corner. I didn’t know his mom very well. Or his aunt.

But I knew Grady.

Grady and my dad were forever working on their cars together. It might have been Grady’s 1974 Coupe deVille that was all black with black interior, so shiny you could check to make sure your shirt is tucked in, or it would be dad’s 1968 Shelby in light green with a cream top and cream interiors that looked like it should be a convertible but wasn’t. More often than not, one hood or the other was up, blankets thrown over the sides of the fenders to protect them and they would be bent over with their heads way down inside the metal innards of their machines, and they talked all the way through the day to well after the sun went down.

They used to let Tyrell and I check the oil levels. We’d reach in and put our finger in the hoop at the top of the dip stick, pulling out the long thin rod that was capped with either black residue or translucent brown oil depending on whether they just needed to check the oil or whether they had just changed it. Then, we’d use a clean rag to clean off the metal. Aim. Slide it back in and pull it out to get a fresh reading, though it was always hard to see the markings for the place that designated low and full.

That was pretty much as far as we got as far as being auto mechanics, though we were pretty much Armor All kings of the neighborhood for at least one hour every weekend. We got better when we started getting paid for our labor. For each car, we got one movie, one bucket of popcorn, one type of candy and two drinks.

These were never the best movies, mind you. Those cost too much. Instead, we got to see the Sunday matinee specials with movies that were at least as old as our parents. Some of them were in black and white. And even though the movies were different every week, we always had the bag of popcorn on one of my legs and one of his and we would pass the candy back and forth with each of us getting the same amount of whatever it was.

Tyrell and I had plans to go see one later today.

I already knew that we won’t be able to make it.

I slunk out of the hallway, and slowly made my presence known. My mom saw me first and elbowed my dad, “David…”

My dad’s head whipped up and he had this confused look on his face, like he couldn’t process my standing in front of him. When I asked what was happening, both of my parents froze. Both of them had their eyes locked and wide open, hers in blue, and his in green-brown, all four of them the size and shape of baseballs.

“Hey, bud. I have some bad news.” Dad looked up at the ceiling to pretend that his eyes weren’t watering up while my mom stood behind him with her hands on his shoulders. “Grady isn’t going to be around anymore.”

“Why not?”

Dad’s voice was ragged and my mom’s chin was dimpled and they both looked like they were going to fall apart at any second. “Grady had a heart attack last night and…he didn’t make it.”

I’d never known anyone who died before.

The theory of it was pretty clear. A person was here and then they were gone and it wouldn’t be possible to talk to them or hug them anymore. But the fact of it, the part about how it happened to someone I knew, someone who I just saw, who was just okay, who waved good bye to me, and said that he’d see me tomorrow, — and he wouldn’t — was something I couldn’t process.

“I gotta go see Tyrell.”

Dad shot up from his chair and yelled, “No!” Then, more gently, once he’d seen how he’d shocked me, he said, “No, Micah. He’s not home right now.”

“Why not?”

Mom and dad looked at each other and did that thing where they nodded but the nod itself was really small, like they thought that only they could see that they did it, and not me. “His dad has already come to get him.”

What the hell? I couldn’t believe that was true. That was just unbelievable.

I cried, “But his dad is in Phoenix! That’s stupid. We’ve got school and his family’s here. Why would he go so far away?”

“Hey, I’m sorry, Micah. Tyrell needs to have his dad care of him for a while.”

“But isn’t there a funeral? What about his funeral? How is he going to say goodbye?” I knew something about the technicalities of the funeral but nothing about what they entailed or how long it would be before they had one. I just knew that he had to come back for it.

Mom took a step in my direction and faltered. She looked like she was going to bend down on one knee so that she could look me straight in the eye like she used to do. But she didn’t. She pulled out a chair. It scraped heavily over the sticky linoleum floor and then she sat down with her knees together and her back straight and her hands clasped together in her lap. “Micah,” she hedged, “I think they are planning to have the funeral with the family in Phoenix.”

No.

No no no no no no.

It really…no.

“Mom, when is he coming back?”

He was my best friend. We did everything together. Everything.  Just like we have since he and his mom moved down the street seven years ago.  We finally got the same sixth-grade teacher, which was good because I can make sure he gets his homework for him but I didn’t know when I could say that he'll be back. And he has to be back because we sit together and, well, everything.  

But that isn’t what mom told me. Instead, she said, “I don’t know.”

Over the course of the next week, I got more details about what happened. Dad woke up when he heard the ambulance sirens outside. He ran outside, and down the street, probably in his ratty blue robe with the ties that flew behind him and his tan leather slippers with sheepskin inside them. Minutes after he got there, they were wheeling Grady out. They kept trying to give him CPR but he’s already turned ashen and had sunk into the stretcher like there wasn’t anything left of him inside his body. Willa was outside screaming. Dad reckoned she knew that Grady was gone, too.

“At least he wasn’t in pain for long,” said dad.

“At least he went quickly,” said mom.

I was sad about Grady. I really was. And I felt bad for his family and I understand why mom would feel the way she did. But mostly, I just didn’t understand why Tyrell had to leave so quickly, too.

Not only that.

I couldn’t figure out how Tyrell got to Phoenix so soon because it took nine hours to drive it. But he wasn’t there wasn’t going to be any driving involved. He was on the first flight out.

They got him to the airport before I even woke up.

We never got to say goodbye.

I got a letter from him in the mail a few days later. It didn't say much and it definitely not all the things that I knew he wanted to, though he did explain that he tried to get his mom to come over and wake me up but she wouldn't do it.

I wrote him a letter back. It didn’t include all the things I wanted to say to him either. Not just because someone else might read it. But also because I was really only speaking to a piece of paper. He wasn’t here. I couldn’t make up half a conversation by myself.

A little while after that, mom got an e-mail account that she would let me use to send him e-mails. We kept in contact. But it wasn’t the same and the letters got shorter and shorter while the time between each message got longer. I knew I should have been grateful but the whole thing made me angry. It was all so unfair.

Aside from the fact that for the first time in our lives, his parents or my parents got to read everything we wrote to each other, I couldn’t touch him anymore. Or smell him. Or share popcorn. Or work up the nerve to tell him some things I’d been thinking about. Things that I couldn’t imagine telling anyone else.

It was probably, definitely the worst time of my life.

I didn’t get to see Tyrell for more than two years.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tyrell is back, but he and Micah are caught doing something others don't approve of. This changes them, and things between them, forever.

Anyone who has ever attended school anywhere, anytime in this century and for most of the last one, knew that once a nickname sticks, you were dead.

I’d never had to consider it before.

It never even crossed my mind.

Now, here I was, with no advanced notice, with no inkling that this would ever happen to me, dead as soon as Stef Tyler leaned over to me and hissed in my ear, “I saw you, Micah _Swallows_.”

Stef was a bitch. Don’t get me wrong. I hated the word and, in fact, I’ve never before used it to describe a person in my entire life. But this. But now. I couldn’t think of anything else call her. She was a bitch.

I knew it.

She knew it.

The entire school knew it and knew how she took pride in it.

And there’s something about a job well done, even if it was really mean, and gushing with hate, and destined to ruin someone’s life, that has the power to transform a group lowly humans into pack hunters. Once the scent of blood is in the air, everyone wants some, everyone wanted a piece of you. Or me, in this instance.

It hasn’t happened yet but I already knew that I, as the unwitting dumb ass, slowest in the herd, was down and that all that remained was for the rest of the pack to catch up.

The job well done, in this case was Stef Tyler’s elegant, though infantile, modification of my reasonably obscure last name, which was Swaeler, to something that would not only classify me as gay, but as the guy who liked to take it. It was both perfect and perfectly horrible.

It was a classic unforgivable sin probably always, but definitely if you’re a thirteen year old guy.

There was something that I thought would have been pertinent to the situation — and it turned out that I was horribly mistaken on this point — was that she and I had never been on bad terms before. And as far as I knew, I’d never done anything to cause her grief or, for that matter, to have incited enough interest in me for her to even know my name. Therefore, she should have had no incentive to decisively, unrepentantly crush me, my reputation and any remaining snippets of my soul that remained in this chair, in this school, in this city, and in this world at five minutes past one on a Tuesday afternoon.

Oh, sure she did _in general._

Her year sucked.

And it started, ironically enough, with a rumor at the beginning of the year. About her. And twenty-six guys. It didn’t start out being twenty-six guys. It started out with her being out of school for two weeks due to illness.

Before she returned to school, it was confirmed, though sources unknown, that she was out with mono. Everyone knows about mono. _The kissing disease._ When I looked it up though, it sounded like a really bad strep throat and there’s nothing at all sexy about that. And, yes. You can get it through kissing … or drinking from the same cup or eating from the same utensils or any number of things.

In this case, there was someone who knew _for certain_ that she had mono but she got it from kissing a guy.

Who wasn’t her boyfriend.

But no one knew who it was.

And then someone knew who it was.

But someone heard it was someone else.

So it had to have been from both of them.

The story grew from there.

I wasn’t really one to talk to about it and quite frankly, the entire thing was pretty obviously farfetched. That said, when Ginny Lopez, who was unbelievably hot, like a fifteen year old girl kind of hot, who would sometimes wear the kind of bra that had her nips poking out of her shirt, which would make me drool a little, said to me in gym class “did you hear…”, I listened. After I got done listening, I had it in my head to say, “I’m pretty sure that’s not true.” Though, actually, I said, “Oh man. That’s crazy.”

That was not a moment I to be proud of.

Every day…no, every _class_ of every day resulted in the rumor getting worse. In the morning, she made out with four guys and by the afternoon, she actually had sex but it was only with two of them.

Honestly, it was the London Fire all over again.

No one seemed to clue into the fact that the scenarios were physically impossible nor did they remember how the story got exaggerated, never mind the fact that they _might_ have been the one to stretch at least one of the truths.

For some reason, the numbers stopped growing with the magic number of twenty-six. I have no idea why twenty-six was the magic number or what stopped it but there it stayed for weeks. But even at that, no one acknowledged the stupid ridiculous heights this reached. And everyone _knew_ it was true because there were _names mentioned._ And the ones whose names were mentioned didn’t deny it when asked point blank.

I was never one of the names but I would like to think that if someone did ask me, even if it was Ginny Lopez, that I would have told the truth. Then again, I wouldn’t have pegged myself for saying, “Oh man. That’s crazy,” before Ginny Lopez was the one who asked me a question.

The tipping point, the point where Stef Tyler really started to change, happened when her boyfriend broke up with her. He even said that the story was bull for a long time but I think it got to be too much for him. And after they broke up, I saw how she looked at him when he was ignoring her.

Then she stopped talking to people.

Then she sat in the back of the class.

Then she decided to fight back.

But another thing I didn’t understand was how even though people knew all of this, even though they had _seen_ it with their own eyes, why did they continually put so much stock into the things she said?

Because they were always true.

Always.

Stef Tyler was meticulous. She got to know everything on everybody. She knew what was true and what was not, largely because the rumors about here were pretty much unfounded.

The down side of it was that when there was dirt to be had, she was all about airing that dirt for general consumption.

Now it was my turn, whether or not I deserved it.

And I knew what she saw.

She saw me and Tyrell Johnson kissing in the cove between the bike racks and the social sciences building sometime between quarter past and twenty past eleven that same morning. It might have been just kissing. I hope it was just the kissing that she saw.

I know that was the time she would have seen something because we coordinated our schedules even before we got to school to decide the period and exact time to get a bathroom pass so that we can meet up for a few awesome moments of what was typically a bull crap sort of day.

Between the short window of opportunity, the zero-traffic place we met, and the random changes of times to get our passes, we should not have been seen.

Now I know we were.

From the way I know that my head was turning beet red, and how it felt like it had expanded, almost like it was ready to explode, she knew that I knew I’d been caught.

“Please don’t say anything, Stef,” I pleaded, and attempted to look as if I’m wasn’t struggling to gulp down air or pass out or die.

I _just_ got him back four months ago.

His mom, who had been in town with the same job the whole time Tyrell was in Phoenix, finally got set up enough that Tyrell could move back from Phoenix to live with her. He didn’t live three doors down anymore but he was close. Bike riding distance close.

As soon as we were together again, it felt like he never left. There was time missing for both of us in terms of shared memory and history. But as far as he and I went, we were solid. We told each other everything, just like we always did, and we got around to talking about who we liked, and who we’d do something with.

He liked Syd Whitehall and the way she wore her jeans low around her hips, showing off that soft flat belly that was practically meant for licking off milkshakes. I liked Ginny. And Tamara. Tamara’s ass was round and firm and it jiggled like jelly and inspired fucking poetry.

We would talk and we’d get boners and do that thing where you pretend not to notice but we’d still keep talking. Eventually, that rolled into what we’ve actually done with the girls we liked and that, in both our cases, was nothing.

One of us had the great idea to practice on each other. I didn’t remember who brought it up first, though I’m pretty sure we were both already thinking it. We didn’t do anything right away because that’s the sort of thing that you can’t take back and even if we both wanted to, it was easier to have an excuse than to come straight out and do it.

But we did talk around it and there was something in how we were talking about it that me feel better about wanting it. We talked about how important it was to know what to do with a girl when we were with one. We agreed. That’s all there was to it. In retrospect, it was probably the first time we said something to the other without meaning it, even though it wasn’t really a lie. At the time, though, we were pretty certain that we knew what we were doing.

It was a completely logical move. We _needed_ to be prepared. For our future. It was going to happen. We were going to do it.

Not _it_ as in sex but _it_ like the stuff we were ready to do with girls.

We were sitting on the couch, twisted so that we were facing each other, and I leaned in. I was close enough to feel his breath on my face. He broke out in an uncomfortable laugh and said, “wait a minute, wait a minute,” which made me scared that he thought that the whole thing was a bad idea.

What he really meant was that the way we were sitting was awkward. It didn’t feel quite right.

So we tried again.

And this.

This moment right here was where I learned that there was nothing more terrifying that the moments before a first kiss. Sweat popped out on my forehead and on the places on my nose where my classes would sit if I had them. My palms were super clammy; it made me glad that we didn’t decide to hold hands as well. Not because I didn’t want to hold his hand but because I wasn’t sure how I would handle him touching that grossness.

It was seriously just a little peck. Both of our lips were puckered up hard. Plus we were trying not to laugh. So he says, “I don’t think that was really real, do you?”

I shook my head no, “So we try again, right?”

“Right.”

My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would fly out of my chest and into his. I licked my lips and smushed them together. He did it next. It was kind of like a sneeze or a yawn because I did it again. Then he cupped my arms with his hands, which burned through my shirt. It was happening.

His eyes got cross-eyed as he got closer to me. I wanted to laugh again but I didn’t. Instead, I looked down at his lips that were slightly parted and a little bit chapped. This time when our lips touched, it was puffy and soft and really nice.

So we did it again.

And then we stopped.

Until the next time we saw each other and decided that we each needed to practice more.

The time after that, he asked me, “So what if a girl asked you to suck her titties?” Of course, I said, “I don’t know.” Because I didn’t think it could possibly be that complicated and also, I wasn’t thinking. He was. And he thought we should practice. So we took our shirts off and I could tell you with one hundred percent certainty that girls who get their titties sucked have the right idea.

Then came the other places we liked. He went crazy for this strip of skin that ran from his arm pit to his waist. For me, it was my back. I liked it tickled and teased, finger-painted (but without the paint) and held totally by the front of him.

At some point, we must have progressed from _practicing_ to actually messing around for real. It was unspoken that we were no longer doing this for anyone else but ourselves. It got to the point where we would even lie down in the sofa, and a few times in his bed, with our shirts off, our hands down each other’s pants, kissing and rubbing on each other, not having a care in the world other than how good it felt.

We kept it secret because we’re not stupid.

A month ago, we started secretly meeting at school. What we had at home, in private, wasn’t enough. We still sat together at lunch and everything. No way in hell were we going to boyfriend it up or anything. We just arranged for a couple of times a week to meet up in secret. It felt extra amazing because of the thrill we got in getting away with it.

And we were until Stef Tyler saw us.

I was aware of the futility of my pleading. Still, I had to try to save the situation.

Instead, it was London Fire take two.

I had no recollection, other than being acutely panicked, about how I left school and got home. As soon as I was home, I called Tyrell. He knew people were watching him, how they said stuff behind cupped hands, how they whispered and laughed and pointed but he didn’t know why. And now he knew. “Dude, we’re going to die.”

“I know.”

We were silent, and we patiently waited for each other to come up with something of such staggering beauty, possibly a plan, better yet, a philosophy to be embraced by teenagers everywhere, that would erase this dilemma from our lives.

Instead, there were tumbleweeds and they flowed back and forth, from me to him and back again.

“I think,” I started reluctantly, “that we just have to deny it. We’ll say that you have a girl coming from Phoenix and you were nervous and I was helping you out. And then, you can talk about this girl.”

“But there isn’t a girl.”

“We know there isn’t a girl but they don’t know there isn’t a girl.”

“They may not know there isn’t a girl but they will know that there isn’t a girl just as soon as I open my mouth.”

That was true. Tyrell was a terrible liar.

“Okay. Well, your friend is coming to town and she and I have been talking and you’re setting me up. And you’ve kissed a girl but I haven’t kissed a girl so you were helping me out.”

“What’s her name?”

“Who?”

“This magical girl. What’s her name.”

“Stefanie Tyrell.”

“Dude.” That’s the girl who got us into this mess and his name. So obviously, it’s got to be better than that.”

“Kathy…”

“No one is named Kathy.”

“Okay. Lori.”

“Lori. Lori, who?”

“Jeez, I don’t know. Lori Bac…Brown. Lori Brown.”

“Brown? That’s what you’re going for?”

“Should it be Smith? Lori Smith…how about Lori Smart?”

“Now you’re just going to say Bond, Lori Bond.”

“I am not. C’mon Ty. Be serious.”

So we made up this person named Lori Brown in excruciating detail. We figured out where she lived, where she went to school, stuff about her family, how she sang and how she rode a skateboard, and what she looked like. By the end of our call, we could have played and won Jeopardy with all the knowledge we had about my future girlfriend Lori, including her favorite flowers (she didn’t like them) and how her favorite color was red.

The next day, I saw Stef Tyler no less than seven times. I didn’t count because I didn’t have to. I saw her between every class and at lunch. That’s not counting the class we have together after lunch. Throughout the day, she looked happier and happier, like the Grinch did on that one Christmas evening.

She dropped another whisper in my ear right before our class ended, “So, how’s your new name, _Micah Swallows?_ I like it. I think it suits you.”

Humiliated, angry, helpless, scared. Not that I was going to tell her any of those things. I threw my stuff in my bag, not caring that that my book and papers were getting mangled. On the wall just inside from the door was a poster that I walked by a million times and never paid attention to before this moment:

_Great minds discuss ideas._

_Average minds discuss events._

_Small minds discuss people._

I wondered if I could be all those things at once. Because, doing bad things Stef Tyler was on my mind, as was the event of the rest of the school year, wondering how I’d get through it, contemplating the idea of what sort of technology or super power would be required to erase everybody’s mind.

“You know, _Swallows_ , I know it sucks but now you’re getting to know how it feels when someone talks shit about you.”

“I never did anything to you. I never said anything about you.”

“Huh. No? That’s not what Tricia Ramirez said. She said that you had an awful lot of things to say about me.”

“Are you kidding? Are you kidding me right now? I. Don’t. Even. Know. You.”

“And why should _that_ matter? It didn’t seem to matter to anyone else and, you know what? Everyone seems to have magically forgot what happened. Don’t _even_ think I believe your shit, Micah.”

Fuck.

There was no getting through to her and I had the worst feeling about how today was going to end. I did mental loops about my savior Lori Brown. All day, Tyrell and I kept a safe distance from each other. We played it so cool.

But still. I knew.

The way it went down started right after the last class. I didn’t even get a chance to go to the lockers. Kevin Muldine and Rory Evans swept me away with their arms over my shoulders like we were buds or something. People watched the three of us walk down the hall in the direction of leaving school. They half drug me across the parking lot and into a section of trees just beyond the school campus.

Tyrell was already there. Someone had torn the hem of his shirt. He was breathing heavy, his nostrils flared and the whites of his eyes were extra big. He was scared. More scared than I’d ever seen him in my life.

I started blathering about the mysterious Lori Brown. How she was coming into town _tonight_ and that we were being kept from going to pick her up at the airport. In a continuing stream of consciousness, I talked about the rumors, and about how all the crap about Stef wasn’t even true, and they were about to make a huge fucking mistake and this entire thing was absolutely ridiculous.

Kevin Muldine laughed lazily, he knew it wasn’t funny at all, he just had to prove that he was one of the school’s leading psychopaths, “Hit him.”

He meant me. He meant for me to hit Tyrell.

“No way.”

He got right in my face and he said slower and growlier, “Hit. Him.”

I was solid on this, “No.”

He stepped back with his stupid duck face smile and with his three boys who tried to make the same stupid duck face smile, because for a reason I know fuck all about, they wanted to be him. Next, Kevin walked over to Tyrell and told him exactly the same thing. But now he wanted Tyrell to hit _me_.

Tyrell didn’t say anything but he didn’t hit me either. Instead, his eyebrows were rumpled and his lip quivered. It made me stronger to stand there, trying to send him courage. I could be strong if it mean I had to be strong for him.

I started talking again, just flapped my gums and waved my hands about wildly, psychically sending out the message _there’s nothing to see here._ I’m facing one direction and then the other, changing my field of view, and when I turn, I didn’t even see it coming.

_Fwap!_

Right on my nose. Holy hell it hurt. I put my hand on it. It was thumping and burning. I was shocked that I wasn’t bleeding.

Tyrell was standing there with his hand still clenched in a fist. The look of apology was all over his face.

This was about survival.

The reality of our situation started to sink in. When I talked about dying before, I hadn’t literally imagined that we’d be put in the literal ground in a literal coffin while our families sat in the church as they cried over a sermon or anything.

In that moment, I learned something about dying and something about choices and I knew I had to make one because Tyrell was in the middle of making his. I was watching him as the apology drained away from his face. The death he was facing was going to be the one without the casket.

But me. I preferred the casket.

And holy fuck did it suck watching him make up his mind to give Kevin Muldine and his crew exactly what they needed to see.

Kevin laughed at me, “I guess I know which one is the pussy now, don’t we?” He cracked his knuckles and walked toward me with a menace I had only seen before on the movie screen. Then he looked back to Tyrell, asking him sarcastically, “You don’t mind if I give your girlfriend a little kiss, do you?”

Tyrell stood there eyes hard with his jaw raised. His eyes got soft for a microsecond and then he got cold again. He changed once. Then he changed back, and then he made his choice to fully and definitively hop the fence, clearly decided in whoever the hell he wanted to be, being alive was part of that plan, “Nope. Be my guest.”

This time I did see it coming. One big, meaty set of knuckles flew toward my face at a fascinatingly slow speed before I felt, more than heard, a massive crunch and then I saw fireworks.

He broke my face.

Kevin Muldine broke my face.

This time, there was blood.

That wasn’t even the worst of it. Kevin and his lackeys turned toward the parking lot and started walking. And Tyrell went with them. In some awful, creepy show of solidarity, my best friend walked off with a bunch of thugs. He left me here bleeding all over myself.

He didn’t even _look_ at me as he walked by.

I knew why he did it.

He did what most sane, normal people with a healthy respect for their own preservation did.

I just couldn’t believe that he did it

I pulled my shirt over my head and mopped up my face best I could. I grabbed my bag that had been thrown into the dirt, and slunk out of the brush, and walked with my head down as quickly as possible to the sidewalk that would have the least amount of people on it and I took the long way home.

The next day, I chose a seat in the back of the room.

The only time Tyrell and I got close to speaking again in the next five months is when we got pulled into the principal’s office to talk about our rumored fight and to get lectured on how violence was never the answer. He got suspended for five days. I got suspended for two.

I got pulled into the counselor’s office a lot after that. They were concerned about my grades. I was acting different. I was anti-social. I was a problem. At the end of the school year, my parents a year-round charter school a forty-five minute bus ride away.

I never saw Tyrell Johnson again.

**Author's Note:**

> Copyright 2016 by Alex de Morra


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